Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
“YOU SHOULD NEVER START A FIGHT, BUT YOU SHOULD FINISH EVERY ONE”
I couldn’t sleep.
Objectively, there wasn’t a lot of reason to be nervous. We were coming home to Anaheim, up three games to one on the Ottawa Senators in the 2007 Stanley Cup final. We had lost only five games—total—during the playoffs, we had knocked off the mighty Detroit Red Wings in the conference final, and we had the series under control against an underdog team that should have been happy just to be there.
But I couldn’t let myself think that way, and I kept tossing and turning all night long with worst-case scenarios running through my mind. What if Scotty Niedermayer gets the flu? What if somebody blows out their groin during the pre-game warm-up? If the Senators win, then we’re back in their rink for Game 6. If they win that, then it’s Game 7, and those are always a coin toss. I was worried about everything. It was a fucking nightmare.
The truth is, the Stanley Cup playoffs aren’t fun for a general manager—they’re exciting, but not fun. You’re cursing your players, cursing the referees, worrying about everything that could go wrong, and it’s all out of your control.
My wife, Jennifer, tried to reassure me.
“These guys aren’t going to let you down,” she said. “You’re not going back to Ottawa.”
She was right, of course, but that night, it didn’t help a bit. We were so close to claiming the greatest prize in sports. There’s no championship that’s harder to win, and when they engrave your name on the old silver chalice, it’s there forever. After the long, unlikely journey I’d been on since the first day I put on a pair of skates, there was no way I was taking it for granted.
The next morning, I pulled into the parking lot at the Honda Center at dawn, which was part of my daily routine.
If you run a hockey team in Canada, everyone knows who you are, and you can pretty much do whatever you want around the arena. But not in Southern California. Not down the block from Disneyland. The security guys at the rink never seemed to figure out who I was—or at least they never acknowledged it. They’d ask me for ID every time, and they would never let me enter through the door that was closest to where we parked, even though I had a master key that would let me in. I had to go through the official security entrance, which was a colossal pain in the ass.
Today, of all days, I wasn’t in the mood to play that game again.
“I’ve got this key, so clearly I’m somebody here,” I told the security guy. “I’m not showing my ID to anybody, and no matter what you say, I’m walking through this door. You can go ahead and call your supervisor if you like, but I’m going in—and by the way, I’m winning the Stanley Cup tonight.”
At least they didn’t throw me out.
Chris Pronger got hurt in that game—so all my crazy fears weren’t completely unfounded. But they shot him up and he stayed on the ice, and by the third period we had a comfortable lead.
With five minutes left in the third period, John Muckler, who was running the Senators, came over to my box and congratulated me. Muck’s a good guy, but in that moment, all I could think was that the fucker was trying to jinx us. I didn’t start to relax until Corey Perry scored to make it 6–2 with three minutes to go.
This was the moment a hockey person dreams about their whole life, and I was going to enjoy it. I went down to the bench to watch the final seconds tick off the clock. The players were all excited and yelling, and our owner, Henry Samueli, was hollering as well, though mostly unintelligibly.
Our video guy came down, and when the clock hit zero, he shouted, “The Chiefs have won the championship of the Federal League!”—a line right out of Slap Shot. Everyone who loves hockey loves Slap Shot. We all laughed our asses off.
It got surreal after that. I went on the ice and did an interview with Ron MacLean, but I honestly didn’t remember doing it until I saw it on an NHL Network replay years later. The crowd was so loud that I was yelling into the mike.
And then it was my turn to lift the Cup, but I have bad shoulders—I had surgery on one of them that spring. If you watch the tape, you can see that I have trouble getting my arms fully extended because my shoulders were fucked, even though the Cup weighs only about 35 pounds.
I was looking for my wife in the crowd, but I couldn’t find her. Meanwhile, there was chaos all around me. What a moment. It was like climbing Mount Everest. But it wasn’t like we didn’t see it coming.
It’s supposed to be bad luck to talk about winning a Cup before it actually happens, but with that Anaheim team, we started talking about it in training camp. We knew how good we were, and after we got Pronger, we were loaded. We had made it as far as the conference final the year before, which gave our young guys some valuable training experience. And then we started the season with at least a point in each of our first 16 games.
That was a team of destiny. I will believe until I die that those Ducks could have beaten any team that has won the Cup since. Maybe Washington would have given us a bit of trouble, but that’s about it. Teemu Selanne. Ryan Getzlaf. Corey Perry. We had all kinds of skill. J.S. Giguere was the best money goaltender in the business. You want to hit? We’ll beat the shit out of you. You want to fight? We do that better than anybody. We fought in the first round of the playoffs, we fought in the second round of the playoffs, we fought in the third round of the playoffs and we fought in the finals. You may never see that again. It was a tough team, but we could play—even our fourth-line heavyweights, George Parros and Shawn Thornton, could play. And Randy Carlyle was the perfect coach for them.
After the game, the dressing room was jammed. My parents were there, and I remember going into the coaches’ office and sitting there with my mom and dad, just savouring the moment. My dad was so proud.
And then Pronger came in. When the game ended and our guys were celebrating on the ice, he skated off by himself and grabbed the game puck (some of the media guys actually criticized him for that, because he wasn’t immediately with his teammates). He walked over to me and handed me the puck. “You put this team together,” he said. “This is yours.”
I still have it.
Now it was time for me to take a drink out of the Cup. My son Brendan and my daughter Molly had already had their chance. Then the players started chanting, “Burkie wants a drink! Burkie wants a drink!” Travis Moen and Parros were holding it, pouring in champagne and warm Bud Light. It was a disgusting mix, and 20 people had already slobbered on it—but it was the best, sweetest drink I’ve ever had in my life. At least it was until they tipped it up and poured it all over me.
The party was going to continue for most of the night, and I was exhausted. I told Jennifer that I was finished and had to go home. Let the players party on. I needed to get some sleep.
I’ll never forget that night. I’ll never forget the whole journey to win it. I’ll never forget the satisfaction. When I went to bed that night, I slept well for the first time in weeks—because in the playoffs, you don’t sleep. But that night, I slept like a baby as a Stanley Cup champion.
Looking back now, I savour those moments. They’re what we strive for. The ultimate. As a general manager, you have to put the right players and the right coach in the room. You’re not the guy who wins the Cup, but you’re the architect.
We had the coaches over to the house the next day, and then later in the summer we had a big party back in Vancouver, where we closed down a restaurant for the night, and none other than Gordie Howe walked in off the street. It was a pure coincidence.
“Okay if I crash your party?” he asked.
Whatever you want, Mr. Howe.
We had the Cup in the room, and Gordie was showing people his name engraved on the rings.
Hockey has been a miracle in my life, and in my family’s life. I’ve travelled the globe. I’ve educated four kids, and I’m educating two more now. The sport has given me so much, and it has given me a voice.
I’m hoping that when people look back on my career, they say five things: he had the right values and made a difference in the cities where he lived and worked; he was a family man, and he brought some good young people along with him. I’ve been a mentor, and I’m proud of that. Oh, and the fifth? He won a Cup.
It’s been a great ride, and it continues. I’m still part of the hockey scene as part of the media, and I still love it. I can’t wait to go to a morning skate tomorrow. I feel the same excitement I’ve always felt.
And I know, especially, that I have been extremely fortunate to have lived the life I’ve lived.
I know you’re not going to believe this, but I was a shy kid. It will surprise you less to know that I was always up for a scrap.
I’m the fourth of 10 children in an Irish Catholic (I guess that part is self-evident) family. My oldest brother Bill, my late sister Ellen and my brother John came before me. We were born in consecutive years—May, June, May, June. My mother never got a rest. I was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in June 1955. Mom took a year off and then had my sister Joan Rachel, followed by Andrea, then Christa, then the twins—Matthew and Victoria—and finally the baby of the family, Meghan.
The great thing about having all those brothers and sisters was that there was always someone to talk to, always someone to read with, always someone to play a board game with.
I was a skinny kid with glasses and crooked teeth (I got braces in high school.). My older brothers could have been embarrassed having me hang around with them, but they never acted that way. They let me tag along, which is why I wasn’t afraid of playing against older kids in sports, and why my musical tastes skewed a little bit older than those of other kids my own age.
My older brothers were my heroes then, and they still are today. Not that we always got along—and they were always willing to fight. Bill and John and I would fight at the drop of a hat.
Dad was bewildered by that. He’d been involved in only one fight in his entire life. When he was in the navy, he had a beef with a guy, and they settled it in the boxing ring.
“I’ve only had one fight in my life and you guys have 25 a year,” he’d say to us. “What’s wrong with me as a father?”
When you grow up with two older brothers who both looked after you and toughened you up, you wind up not being afraid of anything. I was never bullied, never picked on, even though I was a small kid.
Some of that attitude also came from my grandmother Burke. I remember a time when we were visiting her in Clifton, New Jersey. I was out playing by myself and these two neighbourhood kids jumped me and beat me up.
“You go right back out and fight them again,” she told me.
So, I went out, full of fear and trepidation because those kids were bigger than me—but I had a mandate from Grandma, and I wasn’t going back and facing her unless I carried it out. I beat ’em both up.
“That’s all right, then,” Grandma said—that was her favourite phrase. “You should never start a fight, but you should finish every one of them.”
